Yesterday, I said a little something-something about writing suspense and building tension. Today, we’re forging deeper into the Scare Factory, past the sleeping machines that tear men asunder and rend their souls from their bones and make delicious Sriracha sauce. (That stuff is delicious, so it has to be distilled from human souls.)

Let’s get into the time machine. Let’s fly our Delorean back to when I was a wee tot.

When I was five years old, I had a dream. No, not a Martin Luther King dream where all the five-year-olds march on Washington and earn the right to vote and have naptime for everybody, but the kind of dream that scared the poop out of me on a nightly basis.

That nightmare — in black and white — was this:

I entered into an old, decrepit mansion. A mansion that looked to be hastily sketched in dark, thick ink on yellowed paper.

Inside, everything was shadow and dust spider webs. All was still.

And then –

The monsters would emerge.

Most were classic Universal types — the Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula. They were mirrored by… well, cereal-box monsters. (Yes, seriously. Booberry, Frankenberry, and Count Chocula. Hey, shut up. They were sinister at the time, all black-and-white and trying to kill me. That little blue ghost in his porkpie hat will fuck you up soon as you realize he’s trying to reach through your chest and stop your heart. Don’t mess with the Boo.) And then some were just your standard “human murderer” types. Not sure how I got it into my head at that age that I was going to be murdered, but I was a-scared of the humans that lurked in the dark more than I feared the imaginary monsters. Go figure.

When the monsters emerged from their hiding places (behind a piano, under a sheet, from beneath the floor), they’d come for me. Slowly. Hands reaching. Moving as a crowd. And, just as they reached for me, the dream would end. I’d awaken, bathed in sweat. Heart racing. Mouth dry. One time, I actually had fallen off my bed and rolled under it during the dream, so when my eyes shot open, I believed I was trapped in a casket and had possibly died during my sleep.

Yes, this is when I was five-years-old.

I had this dream many times. Not sure how many times, but it plagued me over the course of many months. I became less interested in going to sleep, because there the monsters lurked.

Then, one night, a crazy thing happened. The dream once more unfolded on its awful parchment. I entered the mansion. The monsters emerged, silent, reaching.

But I was able to control the dream. I recognized it as a dream. I knew it was a trap my own brain had put out for me, and if I didn’t want to wake up with pee in my Spider-Man underoos, I’d best dance out of the snare before it dragged me off to the Scare Factory once more.

So, I took control of the dream. I grabbed the levers and knobs.

And I turned it into something that no longer scared me. It became a monster dance party. Music started playing — no joke, it was fucking Monster Mash by “Boris” Pickett. Apparently it was a graveyard smash, because all the classic monsters and cereal monsters and serial killers started dancing and having a ho-down throw-down. I joined them. And, as I boogeyed down, caught in the throes of flailing monster jazz hands and swaying werewolf hips, I knew that I controlled the monsters. They danced for me, not with me. The puppet strings were now tied to my fingers.

Oh, and even better? The dream stopped being in black and white. Poof. Soon as the music started, color bled into the dream. Frankenberry pinks, Booberry blues.

That was my first step toward loving the horror.

And yet, in my early adolescence, I still possessed a fear of All Things Scary, a living, vibrant fear — an ironic fear, at that, as I wasn’t so much afraid of the fiction so much as I was afraid to be afraid. As if that makes any kind of goddamn sense, but young boys are not driven by sense, common or otherwise. Horror movies and books freaked me out. At the time, I planted my feet firmly on fantastical grounds — Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis, Peter Beagle, or with films like Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal or Neverending Story. (Little did I realize at the time that all these products had strong horror elements. Deathlords and Horned Kings? Fiery bulls? Goddamn Skeksis? Brr.) But works of horror? No, thank you. I’ll just sit in the corner and stew in my own cold urine, thanks.

Hell, I was terrified that I might accidentally pass by a television and something scary would be the tube, ready to get me. I was afraid The Exorcist would suddenly appear in the middle of a Golden Girls episode the way a slasher jumps out of a closet. (I blame my sister. She filled my head with tales of terror from when she saw The Exorcist in the theater — blood, vomit and demonic possession, and we’re talking about what was in the audience, not on the screen.) I once caught the opening to Night of the Living Dead (the original), up to and including the “They’re coming to get you, Barbara” line, and it freaked me out so bad I wanted to set the TV on fire just to make sure it couldn’t ever do that to me again.

And yet, somewhere in here was the same need I had when dreaming that awful dream. I needed to exert control. I needed to find not just peace with my anxiety, but a way to kick it in the face, to push it into the mud and slap its ass like it were an impudent child.

I can pinpoint when I took control. I was, I dunno, 11 or 12.

Control came from two sources:

Nightmare on Elm Street, by Wes Craven. And Stinger, by Robert McCammon.

Watching that movie and reading that book freaked the fuck out of me. It was like jumping into a dark well. I didn’t know how far I’d fall. I didn’t know what waited for me at the bottom. It was a mysterious leap of faith, and I’m surprised I actually did it.

And…

Neither scared me. Both were awesome. They got my heart going, but not in a cringing, ready-to-weep-openly way. I was excited. I was like, “Wait, I was afraid of this? Knives for fingers! Bad-ass!” (Curiously, both Freddy Krueger from the film and the intergalactic monster known as Stinger possess razor-fingers.)

(Speakawich, seen the trailer for the Nightmare remake? I’m particularly curious about the intimation that Krueger might’ve been innocent of the charges when they burned him alive. Also fascinating is that Freddy know sounds like Colonel Tigh. Godsdamnit, he growls.)

Book in hand or movie on the tape player, I suddenly had control. The puppet strings were back around my fingers. Monster Mash was playing. The monsters danced to my whims. They boogeyed down to please me, not to frighten me. And that was it. That was the start of my journey toward horror fiction, and further, it marked the path toward the way I’d endeavor to control my fears and anxieties going forward. (Not perfectly, of course — we all still have many miles to walk, after all.)

And holy shit did I ever absorb the scary stuff. I quickly glommed onto the Horror Trifecta of Robert McCammon, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King. I gulped great heaving mouthfuls of Scary Movies, up to and including what at the time were for me the pinnacles of the genre, The Shining and The Exorcist. (Conclusion: the latter gave some thrills but didn’t really scare me like I was told it would, whereas to this day The Shining still gets under my skin more than a little.)

Somewhere along the way, I decided I wanted to write horror fiction for a living. This isn’t precisely true anymore, by the way, but that’s a blog post for another day.

In fact, y’know what? Fuck it. It’s a blog post for tomorrow. It’s October. Shit be scary in October. Let’s go ahead and just make this week a Scare Factory week, and churn out some chatter about horror and horror fiction. Come along for the ride into the screaming clown’s mouth.